Paramount Pictures has issued a denial that Pope Francis cancelled a planned audience with the film-makers behind its $130m epic Noah. “A meeting was never scheduled,” a studio spokesman told the Hollywood Reporter in response to a piece published in Variety alleging that concerns over negative publicity had led to the meeting being shelved.

Variety claims says the encounter was scheduled tentatively for 8:30am tomorrow morning (Wednesday) at the Vatican.

Paramount had reportedly been hoping for an opportunity that might have helped Noah gain vital traction with evangelical film-goers in the US. The studio has been courting religious communities in the run-up to the release of Aronofsky’s film, with executives at one point testing an alternate cut which opened with a montage of religious images and ended with a Christian rock song.

Crowe, who portrays the waterbound patriarch, has also reached out publicly to the pontiff in a series of tweets last month.

Variety reports the meeting ultimately did not happen because the Vatican was concerned news of it might leak, causing a spectacle as Crowe and Aronofsky, the director of Black Swan and The Wrestler, arrived in Rome. The pair are due in the city this week for a press junket and tonight’s (Tuesday’s) Italian premiere of Noah.

Noah has been a controversial project since its inception, with Paramount eager to shore up support in religious communities after early test screenings suggested US evangelicals disliked “dark” scenes in which Crowe’s Noah gets drunk and ponders taking extreme measures to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth. Many also complained that the film inaccurately represented the biblical story upon which it is based, despite the fact that a scene in which Noah has one too many after finding land does appear in the Bible.

Aronofsky said recently that he had won a battle with executives to screen his own version of Noah in cinemas after around half a dozen alternate cuts failed to find traction with evangelical filmgoers.

As well as Crowe, Noah stars Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, Douglas Booth, Jennifer Connelly, Nick Nolte, Ray Winstone and Frank Langella. The film opens in the US on 28 March, with UK cinemas to follow on 4 April.